April 16, 2003
Throughout her career, Angela Davis has been not only an inspiring activist but a daring thinker. In 2003, she published a book that boldly asked the question, “Are prisons obsolete?” a question so important that it became the title of the book. This question is part of a relatively new and rapidly growing campaign that seeks not to reform prisons, but to abolish them. In April 2003, she was generous enough to bring her thoughtful analysis of this campaign to Barnard for a lecture co-sponsored by Africana Studies and the Center for Research on Women.
As anyone who has studied the history of prisons knows, the idea of imprisonment initially developed out of a reform movement, sponsored primarily in the United States by the Quakers, in which the violence of torturous punishments might be replaced by quiet contemplation of wrong-doing in the penitentiary. The opportunity to do penance offered the criminal the chance to reform himself (a word used advisedly), and could allow him to return to society a changed man. While the idea of the penitentiary was intended to reduce violence, it actually produced prisons that are places not of quiet contemplation but of various forms of violation. These institutions have functioned as destructive forces not just to the millions of prisoners housed in them, but also to the communities in which the prisons are located, communities that are disproportionately poor and comprised of people of color, not to mention dependent on the prisons as the major industry. This violence has only expanded with the advent of the “prison industrial complex,” a system of prisons for profit that has come to dominate the United States and many areas of the world. These destructive effects are themselves gendered, as well as raced and classed, a fact that Professor Davis takes up in her new book that will compare the ways in which the industrialization of penitence has affected women in the U.S., the Netherlands, and Cuba. The prison abolition movement asks the question, if the prison system that is now so destructive came from a reform movement, is it better to try to reform prisons yet again, or is it time for imprisonment to end? In her lecture at Barnard, Professor Davis addresses this question specifically with regard to the death penalty by sketching the history of its tie to slavery and the racist nature of the practice, regardless of the skin color of the perpetrator or the victim.
The strongest arguments on behalf of imprisonment are based on the seriousness of violent crime, and the death penalty is supposed to provide prevention for the most serious of crimes and closure for the families of victims. Finding alternatives to the death penalty is a first step toward finding alternatives to imprisonment for crimes that are less serious, but that have effects which are all too real, both for the victims and everyone entangled with the prison industrial complex. We provide this lecture here as a starting point for each of us to ask, “Are prisons obsolete?”
